All of tobytrem's Comments + Replies

Thanks for sharing this on the Forum! 
If you (the reader) have donated your mana because of this post, I'd love it if you put a react on this comment. 

Thanks for sharing this on the Forum! 
If you (the reader) have donated your mana because of this quick take, I'd love it if you put a react on this comment. 

If you predictably do this, you raise the odds that people around you will cook some/ buy some extra food so that it will be "thrown out", or offer you food they haven't quite finished (and that they'll replace with a snack later. 
So I'd recommend going with "Vegan" as your label, for practical as well as signalling reasons. 

Hi Ale, great to have you here!
Let me know (here or via DM) if you have any questions about the Forum, or want any content recommendations,
- Toby, Content Manager for the EA Forum.

Hi Leonora! Welcome to the Forum :)
Let me know (here or via DM) if you have any questions about the Forum, or want any content recommendations,
- Toby, Content Manager for the EA Forum.

Welcome Caleb!
Let me know if you have any questions about using the Forum, on this thread or via DM. 
- Toby, Content Manager for the EA Forum.

Hi Manik!
I'm glad you're finding these ideas so valuable. Let me know (here or via DM) if you have any questions about the Forum, or want any content recommendations,
- Toby, Content Manager for the EA Forum.

Hi Anand, 
Welcome to the Forum, I hope you find your time here valuable. 
Let me know if you have any questions!
- Toby, Content Manager for the EA Forum. 

I can email you the original file, but only if you promise to use it for ~dastardly purposes. 

Not a solution to everything mentioned here- but a reminder that you can click "customize feed" at the top of the page and remove all posts tagged april fools.

I'm interested to listen but I can't find the podcast on Spotify- am I missing something? 

I've loved seeing all the Draft Amnesty posts on the Forum so far! Some really great stuff has been posted (and I'll highlight that when I write a retrospective)

Posting this quick take as a reminder that people who are considering posting for Draft Amnesty can run a draft past me for quick feedback. Just DM me. 

This is great!

Thanks SummaryBot! Looks good to me :)

The Draft Amnesty banner, and other tweaks to differentiate the posts, are a bit delayed and should be up later today. There will be in-post banners, and little topic pills that you will be able to see in the frontpage list. This will all be applied retroactively, so feel free to post your Draft Amnesty posts whenever, as long as they are tagged with the Draft Amnesty Week tag. 

Can be a bit finicky, but I think I've figured out the easiest way. 
1. Select the text of the table and copy. 
2. Paste into your draft, making sure to paste into a paragraph/ normal text section, and not into the heading. If you paste into the title, it'll be reformatted as a title rather than a table. 
LMK if this works!

Have you seen this post from Catherine Low? It's a great example of telling this type of story in a way that Forum readers really appreciated. Maybe a way to make your story more helpful is to highlight lessons you have learned + why you changed your mind at each stage. Seeing more examples of people taking their career seriously, and reassessing deeply held values, is always useful. 

Drafted! (directly because of upvotes + draft amnesty's lower standards. Would never have finished it otherwise)

(I'm linking Xander because I have a hunch that her publication might be interested in commissioning something here/ she might be interested in writing a fiction piece.) 

Very much agree with your suggestions for healthy engagement with posts, thanks for writing them. 

Also, FWIW, I've seen a lot less of a worrying trend towards criticism than I expected before joining the Forum team 4 months ago. Before joining, I had the idea that Forum users would tear ideas apart, sometimes in kind of harsh ways. I'd also internalised the meme that this was a reason for people not to post. 

I've been pleasantly surprised by what I've seen. Specifically, if a post seems unsuitable for the Forum, or particularly ill-conceived, it ... (read more)

@xander_balwit 

Interesting! One of the most salient aspects of Wolf's article, to me, was her argument that a consequentialist who instrumentally valued other things (like family, personal well-being etc) as a means to their ultimate goal would:

a) not really value those things (because she ~argues that valuing is valuing non-instrumentally)
b) be open to (or compelled to) take opportunities to lessen their instrumental values if that would lead to better ends. For example, a consequentialist who could go on a special meditation retreat which would make them care less about their own wellbeing (or their family or etc...) should take that option, and would take it if their only non-instrumental value was the impartial good. 

I'll come back to this because I think there might be something by Richard Chapell on it (it sort of sounds like the idea that impartiality gets you most of the way to EA). 

Another thought is that Draft Amnesty next week might be a good time to spend 30 mins bullet-pointing or dictating your thoughts and then posting them with minimal or no edits. I fully understand that even that can be hard to do after a day's work though, so no pressure. 

I'd be interested in reading a post on the scale of lead poisoning coming from e-waste. Why do you think it is that we can do nothing about it? 
I'm more sceptical that this is particularly relevant to AI, rather than electronics in general, but perhaps you could make that case too. Otherwise I'd be concerned that the argument might be besides the point, a less extreme case of something like "AI is already harming our future, just look at how many flights people take to AI conventions". Which, to clarify, wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but likely puts the focus in the wrong place/ obscures the real trade-offs involved in any human activity.  

I think listicles would be a great style of post for Draft Amnesty (if you're interested). I'd be interested to see any of the listicles, and your 4th idea would be great to see as a more fleshed-out argument (though it is another one which could be a quickly stitched-together take to post on Draft Amnesty, possibly with a request for feedback in the comments before you do a full draft). 

I'm curating this post. I appreciate OpenPhil taking the time to signal the research they would value!

If anyone has thoughts about a research question in this list, consider writing some preliminary notes for Draft Amnesty Week. 

Update: I've now spoken to 11 people who have drafts that they are hoping to post :) 

Personally, I'm thinking of posting a journalistic piece about wild animal welfare which I wrote in late 2022. For various reasons (not quite finished, needs an edit, some people wanted me to check with them before I published it, etc...) I haven't published till now. 

In draft amnesty week, I can overcome these issues, ignore that it isn't quite perfect, and just redact the names and identifying info of people who asked to see their interviews before the piece wa... (read more)

Welcome Nicolas! 
Is there anything about EA or the Forum that you'd like to know more about? I'm the Content Manager, so I might be able to recommend some posts to check out. 
Cheers, 
Toby

I'm glad! Excited to see what you draft if you do.

This problem is part of the reason the Forum's tagging/topics/wiki system is so important. If your post is correctly tagged, then someone interested in the (potentially very niche) question you are answering will be able to find it, even years later. 

I also try to use the Digest to highlight posts which were very good, but get low karma for whatever reason. 

+1. I went to the Effective Altruism Barcelona Give Directly video, and the voting link just took me to the givewell homepage. 

Thanks for sharing Martina! I love the faults, errors, failures illustration with the bugs!

@mincho perhaps this is relevant to your ideas about addiction and overdose interventions? 

This paper I read a few years ago gives an estimate for the mortality cost of carbon emissions. Obviously this is highly uncertain and would change based on projected policy changes/ new technology. The mainline estimate is that the average American's lifetime emissions lead to 1.16 excess deaths before 2100. 

Hi Martina! Welcome :)

No pressure, but if you'd like to share a scientific illustration you've done, I'd love to see it (you can post in a comment below this). 

Have you subscribed to the Forum Digest? If you can stomach another newsletter, it's a pretty good way to read the best of the Forum every week. I've heard that people find reading a couple posts from it a week to be a good way to get into EA ways of writing and thinking. (I'll be sending one out later today)

Cheers,

Toby (Content Manager for the EA Forum)
 

Hi Hani! 
Welcome to the Forum!
"as a reader, what would you like to read?"
Next week I'll post a "What posts would you like someone to write?" thread. I'll link it here when it is out. It should help answer at least one of your questions. 
"How to effectively write a post that can be published on a forum like this one?"
As long as your writing follows our norms, and is relevant to the project of doing good better, we'd love to see it. If you want examples of posts that we particularly liked, read the Forum Digest, or look at our curated posts. 
C... (read more)

Heads up! I'm planning a Draft Amnesty event (like this one). I think the last one went really well, and I'm pretty excited to run this. 

The Draft Amnesty event will probably be a week long, around mid-march. 

I'll likely post some question threads such as "What posts would you like to see someone write?" (like this one) and "What posts are you thinking of writing?" (like this one), and set up some gather.town co-working/ social opportunities for polishing posts/ writing up drafts in the build up. 

I'm also brainstorming ways to make draft amn... (read more)

I'm curating this post. 

Partly this is because there is great advice in here, which I expect will be useful to early career EAs, and I'd love more of them to see it. 

But I'm also curating this because good career advice is valuable, and It'd be great to see more of it posted on the Forum. If you have given a piece of career-related advice to several people, consider writing it up for the Forum. If it is small, or you aren't sure whether it is valuable, post it as a scrappy quick take. 

Hey Adin, thanks for joining!

It's really cool that you seem to be taking the project of doing good so seriously. I hope the Forum is a useful place to explore the questions you're interested in. 

Let me know if there is anything you need to know or feedback about the Forum (here or in dm). 

Hey Vasco, thanks! Would you mind expanding on why it would be good to run the test during weeks with many unusually high quality posts?

That's so interesting! I've seen that a lot of people respond to that book by picking up the love of thinking totally unmoored from society that the glass bead game represents. But I read the book as a satire of that kind of thinking, or at least as a stark illustration of its limitations. I guess in that way it could be read as helpful to EA — we shouldn't think only for our own benefit. Is that the message you got from it? 

Thanks Nick! I really appreciate that thought, that righteousness doesn't become arrogance. I guess I was thinking of it like an Aristotelian virtue, where an excess of righteousness is arrogance — but I see now that that doesn't make sense. Righteousness + arrogance or + pride = self-righteousness rings more true. 

These are really valuable comments and I'm sure they'll result in an edit (for one thing I'd like better examples of tragic beliefs, and making them explicitly normative might help.)
I'll respond properly when I have time, thanks! 

Thanks for this Julia! Nothing but respect for weirdo vegetarian quakers. 
Not what you're implying here but I definitely want to emphasise that I don't think of activists like Lay as enjoying their disruption by default. Even if they get this 'joy in righteousness' it'd be odd if they felt that way all the time. 

+1 on Meghan Barrett. Her talk on insect welfare at EAG London last year was one of the best talks I've seen. Great argument, conceptually clear, changed my mind. 

Hi James- you've put March in the heading but February in the text. 

Haha no need to apologise for hanging out on lesswrong!
Thanks for your feedback :)

Hi Vasco! Since you asked- yes I really appreciate your posts. I think link-posting is underused, and you provide a really great example of it. Your original work, like this one, is great as well. Keep posting!